Guesing most JP devs thinks the same, then again it should help with some JP games like dynasty warriors. Matter fact they all could do much more if and this guy is wrong only thing that make switch different is the on the go design.

Not so much having games on the go, but the ability to seamlessly "switch" between console and handheld functions. It allows us to play console games natively on the go or on a TV without the need for multiple saves, transfers, or a wifi connection. It litterally has every Nintendo gimmick packed in as well, from touch screen to motion controls. It is all there, so no matter how you slice it, the Switch is a very innovative and great device to have.

Having said that, there are multiple ways to innovate, and Sony/MS are going a different route. No need for platinum to downplay them, as options for us gamers is only a good thing. Having everyone do the same thing would be boring afterall.

Games on the go is so lame imo. Your playing on a tiny screen and at like 720p. Who wants that? Maybe when I was 12 playing Pokémon was cool on the go but now with all the great games out why would I spoil that on a tiny screen.

Thats nice, thats why there are options. I have downtime at work and my PS4 Pro cannot not provide me the ability to play during that time. Also as a father with small children, I cannot very well retire to my den while my 2 year old runs rampant throughout the house. But with Switch, I can monitor them and get in some extra time on the game as well. Because of this, I buy all multiplats that come to Switch, on the Switch. On weekends and very early mornings when I feel like getting up at 3 am, I play docked. The versatility is king for me, and PS4 cannot touch that.

For the few games that I feel I must play that don't come to Switch, that is where my PS4 Pro comes in. I beat REmake 3 over the course of a weekend and am about to finish FFVIIR (which is taking longer due to limited time tied to a TV).

But because of Switch, I was also able to enjoy Metro Redux, Trials of Mana, Animal Crossing and soon Outer Worlds as well thanks to the hybrid nature of the device. Not sure if you guys are that narrow minded to fail at realizing that the Switch is selling for a reason (which is that your needs =/= the needs of others), or if you are bitter about the success of the Switch in general.

And no, it is not Nintendo fans alone supporting the Switch. This is why it has destroyed the WiiU and already passed X1 in less than half the time X1 was on the market. The Switch has a wide appeal, and for good reason.

Not once did I see him say anything about the Switch in those quotes. The reality is its not the hardware that completely drives innovation, the creativity of the talent working on the hardware that produces ground-breaking experiences.

There hasn't been any ground-breaking tech that I can think of in gaming in a while, as consoles and even handhelds are basically mobile hardware (in the sense of consoles laptop equivalent, and handheld cellphone / tablet equivalent) across the board. The only real innovation has been in game development and design, and game peripherals like PSVR, Kinect 360, Wii-Mote, PS Eye PS2, etc...

If Platinum wants innovation, then use the newfound powers in the new consoles to create it.

Did... did you read the article? He mentions the Switch explicitly and explains:

"As an industry, it’s all very promising and I don’t want to be perceived as too negative. But to give another example of my point, the Nintendo Switch was very ground-breaking in how it was able to just to take a home console and make it portable. It’s something that you hadn’t seen a lot of people doing before: it took this wall, that perhaps a lot of people didn’t know even existed, and broke it down. --- Switch opened up all these new possibilities. I think the Game Boy and the DS also did that: there were so many surprises in those. If you compare that to when you’re simply seeing graphical improvements or just ‘faster, bigger’… obviously it’s nice, but it doesn’t have that same inventive quality that really surprised me with past consoles."

That doesn't make a console ground breaking though. I mean, it's a great feature I guess, but it does absolutely nothing to innovate the overall hardware, or the games on the system itself.

If the idea that ground breaking is in how the user uses the system, then that's backwards. The ground breaking stuff should be in how that system changes gaming, because Switch doesn't do anything that does that. The example given just gives people an option to play the same game on the go, as opposed to having it hooked up to a TV.

Yes, it is important to consider this comment in the context of the Japanese market. The switch basically reversed a multi-generational trend of waning console sales in Japan by being a portable home console.

Compared to its predecessor, the only market that the ps4 is still trying to catch up to is the Japanese market.

Is the portable aspect really used much in Japan? I was there about a 6 months after launch and the only time I saw one in use was on the plane ride there. Never saw one in the subways, or anywhere else. I went back a year later and never saw one at all.

Before PS there was no such thing. It was their decision to switch to an optical drive to spur CD/DVD growth that brought load times to consoles. In fact, it got so bad with PS3 and blu-ray that they had to start installing parts of games to the PS3 hard drive to get load times down from optical discs. And they called it a feature. LOL.

I guess I'm the brave one who liked this comment? Too bad the truth is you're right games had to be designed to leverage the system's weaknesses to load in content but it is also true that basically every game console and computer saw extended loading times since the PS1 era. Computers have only started to keep loading times down thanks to faster I/O (some of which is actually also available on PS4 with NVMe being the only hold out not available on consoles until next generation). Games used to be very small. The entire GameBoy through Gameboy Color library could fit on a 8 BD-ROM discs or less! Because figuring the total space requirements actually requires ownership of every game cartridges file I decided to look at the largest cartridge sizes the system supports and the total number of games released. There were 1,056 GB games and GB carts maxed out at 4mb. GBC had 660 games and carts as large as 8mb with GBA having 1,510 titles on carts as large as 256mb so 8 BD-ROMs is the total size of all of the GameBoy's software if every cartridge were completely full. Assuming we threw all of the 296 N64 titles in there too you'd still only need to add a DVD to the 8 Blu-ray discs you already have, but the reality is you'd probably need less than 8 Blu-rays worth of space for every game on all Nintendo's GameBoy systems plus the NES through the Nintendo 64 all on 9 BD discs *OR LESS!* Imagine all your PS4 games fitting on a single BD ROM... There are already games on PS4 that don't fit on one BD anymore Gran Turismo Spec II is one such example already... And you still need to download some content from the servers!!! It's really that huge. When 2 BD aren't enough for one game...

Anyway yeah GT Sport takes a while to load races but that time hasn't increased with all the new content. It's a limitation of the I/O itself that prevents fast loading. Imagine GT Sport loading a race in 2-4 seconds instead of the 55-70 that it takes now. That's what next gen brings. Near seamless loading across many if not all games.

I'm not saying load times will be gone entirely they'll just be far less intrusive most of the time. There was loading times in SNES games too from my time playing on the SNES mini and if I recall correctly Diddy Kong racing had brief loading screens too (they were totally black loading screens that at longest hung around for 2-3 seconds).

In the cartridge era, them games would have been classed as large, and hard to produce with the tech available.

Games these days may be larger, but the tech has also evolved so that the process of creating games is more simplified. That is why you have 1 man teams, producing games looking largely on par with AA games of major publishers today.

GameBoy games were just a few megabytes in size. Games on disk (cartridges) were tiny and RAM while far slower and infinitesimal by today's standards was fast enough to load in 2D sprites and or very simple geometric shapes. GameBoy to N64 were simple machines. PS1 was indeed even slower due to CD I/O.

There is just one tiny problem... If CDs were the issue and carts are the solution why is Switch so slow?

The Switch uses flash memory cards rather than traditional cartridges. They're essentially just SD cards. The old cartridges on the N64 for example basically acted like RAM, they gave the system direct access to the game files. It was a much faster way of handling data.

The reason discs won out is because they're far cheaper, not that they're better. The N64 cartridges in the 90's could read at 50MB/s. The PS4's much newer hard drive reads at 75MB/s. That shows you just how advanced cartridges were, even back then.

CDs weren't better? I'd say that extra 636 megabytes of storage was a definitive bump and allowed huge worlds to exist on PlayStation and other consoles and PC. Then and even now space is more important to gamers and developers than speed. Would developers or gamers be excited for PS5 if the hardware could only support 200GB of storage? I sincerely doubt it!

Are and the various other disagrees that dense?Of course games on cartridges in the 2nd-4th gens didn’t have much loading times because the data wasn’t massive. Games barely came out to a gigabyte back then.

You can’t be sane and compare that to the next gen moving massive amounts of data in a very fast manner to what was done in the 80s and 90s.

You especially can’t overlook that along with the other technological advancements these new consoles bring and yet act like the Switch is the most groundbreaking thing ever imagined. That’d be the same whack thinking where some people proposed that Wii did more to advance gaming than either PS3 or 360

I never said the Switch was the most groundbreaking thing ever. It's just a fact that we didn't have load times. The reason for that doesn't even really matter. Split second loading is not new, so it isn't groundbreaking.

I think talking and communicating with NPCs in game would count as "inventive creativity". Microsoft could import Cortana's voice command tech and it would be a totally different experience compared to 8 year old games using voice tech.

Think full blown conversations with NPCs. I think a lot of players would enjoy the sensation of strategically planning for a battle by verbally communicating with their NPC team beforehand. They already have full blown human-computer verbal conversation tech up and running in Japan with their digital girlfriend apps.

@kthxcrayon That's an excellent idea. It's plain to see with the success of Amazon Alexa and Google Home Speaker the public enjoys engaging A.I. in verbal conversation. With my Google Home Speaker it always says "Sorry, I didn't quite get that." and therefore leaves a lot to be desired...

I would buy a home console switch anytime for a reduced price. When you consider that the display is a big part of the price, a home-only switch could probably sell for $200, maybe even lower considering it costed Nintendo the equivalent of $257 to manufacture it back in 2017. Nothing better for Couch coop play on a big screen with lots of guest over :)

I agree. To deny next gen improvements while praising last gen simplicity makes it sound like This guy wants to stay in his Comfort zone and would prefer to stay with last gen GFX. His teams aren't even talented enough make a game like Scalebound up to Microsoft's hit or miss standards. I think this dude wants to develop on the cheap and collect the maximum revenue he can with minimal effort. Switch lets him do that.

Sony and Microsoft have proven again and again that people just want consoles with better graphics and nothing more, and that’s imo not really a bad thing. But I’m also happy that we’ve got Nintendo that tries to innovate on how games are played in more aspects than just looks. The new ps5 controller is interesting though, and I hope Sony will give VR more focus with the ps5. I’m excited to see what Nintendo will do after the Switch though. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a Switch 2 that mainly just focused on better graphics.

I want experiences. Sony offers those in spades. Nintendo has good games that are finely crafted, but I feel their actual experiences are not as frequent. Most of their games aren't really story driven to offer the kinds of experiences I'm looking for, and don't mention BOTW, because while it was an experience, it was kind of a dull one.

I respect if you want a different kind of experience from games, but you want to make it out to be like Sony and MS fans only care about the graphics and nothing else matters. While I'm sure we could point to some who do prove that assertion true, it doesn't mean that its an absolute. I mean, if you want to talk about new and innovative ways to play that don't rely on just looks, why not give the crown to Sony for PSVR? Graphics aren't that great. It's an entirely new experience rather than just an underpowered console that happens to also be a portable but essentially just plays games that could easily be played on other consoles. PSVR is everything you say that Nintendo has to offer, and PS fans seems to be pretty positive about that.

Nothing about Switch's hardware couldn't be done on other consoles except for the portability. It isn't the switch hardware which makes their games good, nor "ground breaking"....although that's a stretch of a term to use. It's that they make good games, and its pretty narrow minded to posit that they are the only ones that do so regularly.

I think you’ve misunderstood me. I was solely talking about the hardware and I also gave credit to both VR and Dualsense on Sony’s part. And even though I said that many only want better graphics with their next console doesn’t mean that I also think they only want better looks in their games. Of course they want inovative games with great stories too. My point is that a lot of people who likes playstation and microsoft doesn’t want the next gen console to be a machine centered around for example motion controls, a tablet controller or even kinect as microsoft found out with the Xbox One. I’m even one of those people and I’m happy ps5 won’t be anything other than a console with better graphics. But I’m also happy Nintendo is doing something different.

I agree that Nintendo doesn’t offer great stories. But I do believe they offer the most inventive gameplay. Sony on the other hand deliveres incredible stories but the gameplay, although good is a lot of the time way more repetetive and similar to other recent games.

Nothing compared to the complexity of the cell processors, a faster hardrive with a compression engine is not the same. A brand new processor architecture that hadn't been done before, now that's revolutionary.

I'm sure if Sony could redo the PS3 they would have done something different, the Cell processor while powerful was overall hard to develop games for which led most 360 3rd party games looking and running better. It was also expensive, something like a $200-$300 loss per unit which led Sony to not making a profit on the system until 2010.

There's a lot more software and maybe mechanical trickery though, so not just a powered up PC. I can't imagine the quality of games around mid gen. Hell, even 2nd year games will look spectacular, I'm sure. Devs always push the consoles further than what the specs say.